Little Failure (9 page)

“I’ve lost him, I’ve lost my son,” my father is wailing. “I’ve lost my little Igor. Where is he? I simply cannot find him.”

Is he kidding or is he seriously worried?

And I want to jump out and say, “Here I am! You haven’t lost me at all!” But this is against the rules of the game. Isn’t all the fun in
staying hidden
? You’re supposed to feel scared when the papa who’s looking for you gets closer, is about to find you, but instead I feel sadder when he seems to lose my scent. And then when he approaches I feel scared again. Sad, scared. Scared, sad. Is that what I’ve been looking forward to for so long in my sickbed? No, it is this: Suddenly Papa jumps out from behind an adjoining spruce, screams “Found you!” and I scream with joy and try to escape. He scoops me up in one easy gesture, hoists me onto his shoulders, and we walk past the Lenin, who is also happy that I’ve been found, toward our apartment one gigantic Stalinist block away where Mother is making cabbage soup, hot and tasteless.

We live on Tipanov Street, House 5, Apartment 10. A sign at the mouth of the street informs us that
ALEXANDER FYODOROVITCH

TIPANOV (1924–1944) WAS A BRAVE DEFENDER OF THE CITY OF LENIN. IN 1944, HE SHIELDED HIS TROOPS WITH HIS BREAST AGAINST ADVANCING FIRE, ALLOWING HIS COMRADES A SUCCESSFUL CHARGE FORWARD. THE FEARLESS WARRIOR WAS POSTHUMOUSLY AWARDED THE TITLE HERO OF THE SOVIET UNION
. I like to think that my grandfather Isaac, my father’s father, who also died in the war at a ridiculously young age, performed a similar feat, even if he wasn’t a Hero of the Soviet Union. Oh, how I would love to put my own breast in front of some artillery fire so that my comrades could charge forward and kill Germans. But first I will have to make a friend or two my own age, and that equally heroic feat is still years away.

As my father carries me from the hide-and-seek spruces by the Lenin statue to Tipanov Street, House 5, Apartment 10, we pass by the other important institution in my life, the pharmacy.

One of the most frightening words in the Russian language is
banki
, which nominally refers to the plural of a glass or ajar but which the Oxford Russian-English dictionary also helpfully describes as “(
med
.) cupping glass.” I’m not sure about the
med
. part, because I’ve yet to meet any sufferer of asthma, pneumonia, or any other bronchial disaster that this insane form of peasant remedy has ever cured. The local pharmacy carries few useful medicines, but the least useful of them is
banki
. The application of said “cupping glass” to the soft white back of a wheezing Leningrad boy in 1976 represents the culmination of three thousand years of not-so-great medical intervention beginning with the traditional practices of the Greeks and the Chinese and ending here at the pharmacy on Tipanov Street.

This is what I remember all too well. I’m lying on my stomach. The
banki
are produced; they are little glass jars, greenish in tint, each probably the size of my child-foot. My entire back is rubbed with Vaseline by my mother’s strong hand. What follows is frightening beyond words for any sane adult, let alone an anxious child. A pair of tweezers wrapped in cotton is soaked in vodka or rubbing alcohol and set on fire. The flaming pincers are stuck into each glass cup, sucking
out the air to create suction between the cup and the skin. The cups are then clamped along the length of the patient’s back, supposedly to pull the mucus away from the lungs but in reality to scare the little boy into thinking his parents are raving pyromaniacs with serious intent to hurt.

Let me close my eyes now. I’m hearing now a long match struck against the matchbox by my mother—
ptch—
then the flames of the pincers as orange and yellow as the polluted Leningrad sunset, then the whoosh of air being sucked out as if by a neutron bomb, just like the one the American imperialists are threatening on television to use against us, then the sting of the warm glass against my back. And then ten minutes of lying as still as a dead October leaf at the bottom of a pool, lest the
banki
pop off my tortured back and the whole procedure is to be repeated again.

The first step of our multipart emigration to America will involve a weeklong stop in Vienna, before we move on to Rome and, finally, New York. I will be six years old and breathless from asthma per the usual and will have to be taken to a Viennese medical clinic. Herr Doktor will take one look at my black-and-blue-bruised back and prepare to call the Austrian police forces with a fresh report of child abuse. After my parents nervously explain that it was merely “cupping,” he will laugh and say: “How old-fashioned!” or “How idiotic!” or “You crazy Russians, what will you do next, huh?” He will give me something I have never encountered back in the USSR: a simple steroid-fueled asthma inhaler. For the first time in my life, I will enjoy the realization that I do not have to choke to death every night.

But right now there is no such solace. And both my father and I know that the fun we just had running among the spruces beneath the Lenin in Moscow Square will exact a price. Tonight I will be sick. In fact, I know even as we walk past the pharmacy with its bold, ugly
APTEKA
sign, I am already instructing my lungs to shut down. Another thing we do not realize in 1979: Asthma is, at least in part, what they call an “emotional disease,” triggered by stress and fear.

But fear of what?

Sweaty me is carried into the warm, cabbagy apartment and my mother is screaming at my father: “How could you stay out so late? How could you let him run in the cold? He’s overheated! Now he will be sick!”

And he starts screaming back at her, “Oy, yoi, yoi! She knows everything! A fucking doctor she is!”

“Don’t swear”—
Ne rugaisya matom—
“the child is here.”

To me: “Igor,
ne povtoryai
.” Don’t repeat our cursing.

“You’re the one who swears.”

“Me? You know what? Go to the dick!”
Poshol na khui
.

“Fuck your mother!”
Yobtiki mat’
. I record and mispronounce the bad words inside myself.

My mother loses her Russianness and retreats into the primordial Yiddish of her late grandmother from the Belorussian shtetl of Dubrovno:
“Gurnisht! Abiter tsoris!”
You’re a nothing! A bitter misfortune!

My breathing grows shallow. What language will they sink to next? Aramaic? I take off my pajamas and dutifully lie down on my stomach. My parents, still screaming at each other in two languages, prepare the cupping kit, getting the rubbing alcohol ready to feed the flames. A mere decade later I will find a new space to fill with alcohol.

And so I am cupped.

After cupping I cannot sleep. My back is covered in circular welts, and the asthma has only been exacerbated. I am on the living room couch that serves as my bed, wheezing. I pick up an illustrated children’s book about a young boy and girl who are (for reasons that now escape me) shrunk down to miniature size and then attacked by a swarm of gigantic mosquitoes. On one of the pages of the book, a spot of jam has coagulated to form what looks like the crushed remains of a particularly vile insect (in swampy Leningrad, the mosquitoes are the size of Lenins). A sleepless, suffering child exists in a kind of fourth dimension, where language runs unbidden through the tiny but
growing mind and the external senses are primed to receive a flood of information. Hence: fictional mosquito, coagulated jam, vile insect, the heavy embrace of the sagging couch, patterns of the wall rug hanging above it forming real Arabic numbers and unreal Tibetan words (I have recently visited the Museum of Ethnography), Mama and Papa in the next room, sleeping after their latest fight, oblivious to all the action inside my head.

The northern sun clambers atop its perch with what can only be described as resignation, radiating pink across the tops of birches and the heavy architecture. A pink that, to the sleepless young eye, is filled with ribbons of life, amoeba shapes that float and twirl across the landscape and beyond it, a fifth dimension to the already busy fourth one I have described above. And to my old man’s wheezing is added amazement. I have been cupped, true, but I have lived through another night. The sagging couch, which I have long ago rechristened the
Imperial Snotty
, an eighteenth-century Russian frigate just like the one that lives in the nearby Museum of the Battle of Chesme, formerly the Chesme Church, where Papa and I like to launch our toy helicopters among the church spires, has made its way through the foggy night. The pressure of falling asleep has lifted, there is nothing to fear and nothing worth struggling for, and with that easing of expectations comes the unexpected. I fall asleep in the morning, the city bright and alive around me, Lenin with his outstretched hand greeting the schoolchildren in their uniforms, the workers and soldiers and sailors in theirs. Outside the window, two neon signs gently flicker on as I rumble into sleep.
MEAT
, one of them says. And then:
PRODUCE
.

Words. I hunger for them even more than the
MEAT
and
PRODUCE
they claim to advertise. The next day, if I am well, we will walk past my Lenin to the Moscow Square metro station, and there will be more words for me to eat.

Velikii moguchii russkii yazik
. The Great and Mighty Russian Tongue
is how my first language bills itself. Throughout its seventy-year tenure, bureaucratic Sovietspeak had inadvertently stripped the language of Pushkin of much of its greatness and might. (Try casually saying the acronym OSOAVIAKhIM, which denotes the Association for Assistance of Defense, Aircraft, and Chemical Development.) But in the late 1970s the beleaguered Russian tongue can still put on quite a show for a five-year-old boy in a Leningrad metro station. The trick is to use giant copper block letters nailed to a granite wall, signifying both pomp and posterity, an uppercase paean to an increasingly lowercase Soviet state. The words, gracing the walls of the Technological Institute station, read as follows:

Now, what the hell does
that
mean? Ah, but Baikal-Amur sounds so beautiful—Baikal, the famous (and now famously polluted) Siberian lake, a centerpiece of Russian myth; Amur (
amour?
) could almost be another word Russian has gleefully appropriated from the French. (It is, in fact, the name of a region in the Russian Far East.)

I’m five years old, felt boots tight around my feet and ankles, what might be half of a bear or several Soviet beavers draped around my shoulders, my mouth open so wide that, as my father keeps warning
me, “a crow will fly in there.” I am in awe. The metro, with its wall-length murals of the broad-chested revolutionary working class that never was, with its hectares of marble vestibules, is a mouth opener to be sure. And the words! Those words whose power seems not only persuasive but, to a kid about to become obsessed with science fiction, they are indeed extraterrestrial. The wise aliens have landed and WE ARE THEM. And this is the language we use. The great and mighty Russian tongue.